Tuesday, September 29th 2009
Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs
Anti-Aliasing has been one of the most basic image-quality enhancements available in today's games. PC graphics hardware manufacturers regard it as more of an industry standard, and game developers echo with them, by integrating anti-aliasing (AA) features in the game, as part of its engine. This allows the game to selectively implement AA in parts of the 3D scene, so even as the overall image quality of the scene is improved, so is performance, by making sure that not every object in the scene is given AA. It seems that in one of the most well marketed games of the year, Batman: Arkham Asylum, doesn't like to work with ATI Radeon graphics cards when it comes to its in-game AA implementation.
Developed under NVIDIA's The Way it's Meant to be Played program, and featuring NVIDIA's PhysX technology, the game's launcher disables in-game AA when it detects AMD's ATI Radeon graphics hardware. AMD's Ian McNaughton in his recent blog thread said that they had confirmed this by an experiment where they ran ATI Radeon hardware under changed device IDs. Says McNaughton: "Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced." He further adds that the option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure-rom.
With no in-game AA available to ATI Radeon users, although the features do technically work on ATI Radeon hardware, the only way AA can be used is by forcing it in Catalyst Control Center. This causes the driver to use AA on every 3D object in the scene, reducing performance, compared to if the game's in-game AA engine is used. "To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory," McNaughton adds. Choose with your wallets.
Developed under NVIDIA's The Way it's Meant to be Played program, and featuring NVIDIA's PhysX technology, the game's launcher disables in-game AA when it detects AMD's ATI Radeon graphics hardware. AMD's Ian McNaughton in his recent blog thread said that they had confirmed this by an experiment where they ran ATI Radeon hardware under changed device IDs. Says McNaughton: "Additionally, the in-game AA option was removed when ATI cards are detected. We were able to confirm this by changing the ids of ATI graphics cards in the Batman demo. By tricking the application, we were able to get in-game AA option where our performance was significantly enhanced." He further adds that the option is not available for the retail game as there is a secure-rom.
With no in-game AA available to ATI Radeon users, although the features do technically work on ATI Radeon hardware, the only way AA can be used is by forcing it in Catalyst Control Center. This causes the driver to use AA on every 3D object in the scene, reducing performance, compared to if the game's in-game AA engine is used. "To fairly benchmark this application, please turn off all AA to assess the performance of the respective graphics cards. Also, we should point out that even at 2560×1600 with 4x AA and 8x AF we are still in the highly playable territory," McNaughton adds. Choose with your wallets.
353 Comments on Batman: Arkham Asylum Enables AA Only on NVIDIA Hardware on PCs
I havnt like wanted to play a game that doesnt work on ati yet, phew.
Far beyond acceptably on both, without AA it looks ugly and ruins my experience of a game, reason why i dont like to play anything before a new videocard comes, waiting for 5870 2GB
Another issue here, previous post.
HEll if it works with opera chrome etc.
We have another problem, we only "support" IE due to a security chief from a stubborn country, and we break the law daily cause IE sux.
They act like they are the only ones who sell's :) , let's say weed , so in their mind they can pretty much do anything.
If they keep this up eventually we will have 2 groups divided , people who own ATI cards will buy ATI games , people who own Nvidia cards will buy Nvidia games.
Ati didn't make a move in this direction but Nvidia thinks they are big enough to impose Physx/CUDA like everybody on this planet owns only Nvidia video cards , if statistics prove that 90% of possible customers own Nvidia cards then ATI owners are fuc...ked.
It's sad AMD/ATI aren't this agressive , whinning about a game not supporting ATI properly is not good , what should i do ? what do they expect me to do ? you the big shot with billions of dollars do something , if you can't i'll buy Nvidia even if i don't like what they do.
Nvidia owners are probably happy with this , they could even come here and defend the green bastards but like someone here said , if it was the other way they would be outraged.
Also , saying DX11 is not so important , but CUDA and PHYSX are , of course , crap after crap , come on with the next generation Nvidia , how much are you gonna milk Gt200 and g92's ?
2. (responding to your message) That is not the issue at all here as I'm sure you understand, making sure something works well on your product OR paying devs to make the competators version worse, is quite something different.
ATI is pushing DX11, i can defend that, cause when nvidia get thier fist out of their ass which seems to be stuck.
They get the same features, ati is pushing tech that matrox, ati, intel, nvidia and via can use!
Not ATi only.
PC gaming already lacks of hardcore games, please don't add more stupid political into PC gaming industry.
Thank you.
2. As I've said, in either of the two senerios I believe more likely to be true, nVidia did not pay to make the competition any worse than they already were. ATi's position was not made worse in anyway by nVidia, nVidia's position might have been improved, but ATi's position wasn't made worse.
Sincerly,
New Cubs fan :pimp:
National team player in 3 games.
Europe Class A player
Had games broadcasted on LIVE TV in germany, and im not a gamer ?.
Dont say things you dont know.
My progaming history might be over, but i'm still a gamer.
You dont even know me, how can you say that then ?
Get youre facts right.
My statements is backed up by own testings, physx with ati and nvidia cards did work, not anymore.
Ati had AA and more performance no problem.
Physx can run just fine on cpu.
3 things ive seen you defend like its youre newly born child.
Secondly, it's our fault, the pc gamers, we warez alot.
Thirdly it's nvidia's fault which is a company, from the worst. It's main interest is the profit at any cost.
I have a gtx260 currently, and this will be the last card I buy from invidia. And this kind of thing is the reason. I don't want, for there to be only one vga company, like I don't want there to be only one major cpu maker.
The proprietary crap has to end, Really, being forced to buy from only one company is just ridiculous. My thinking immediately goes to physx/havok and both having become proprietary. Really, had things ended in a way that was good for the consumer, both of those companies would have licensed their APIs to both ATI and invida, and it would run on either brand of GPU. Now, Nvidia is blocking the functionality of Physx if there is an ATI card doing the rendering. (link) The big business attitude that both invida and intel have do a good bit to ruin gaming and computing in general. I'm actually pissed, computers and gaming are time out of mind for me...And this kind of crap is done by companies that charge ridiculous amounts of money given the opportunity. Their needs to be some kind of redressment...some how.
The day AMD acquired ATI was in retrospect probably the darkest day in computing history, since on that day the unholy amalgamation that it created out of AMD and ATI fanboys will probably create a black hole that will swallow us all. And any threads on TPU with keywords such as "ATI", "AMD", or "Radeon" will continue to bloat in response rate irregardless of the validity of such threads. This thread was such obvious fanboy catastrophe in the making. Is Charlie Demerjian submitting news on TPU now? I mean 136 responses in less than five hours and all because of some shi**y comic book hero game and some ultimately minor injustice?
Maybe I should be thankful, at least ASUS-related articles have dropped to one per week, from about twenty per day from few years ago.
AMD hater okey, i dont mind, ATI is still the same company, and AMD have done nothing but good with ATI, Open source, Drivers, market strategies that really makes sense! (might not be reason of bought by amd)
However, its not negative at all!
Nvidia is despicable, but hey I've known that since the time I had to RMA my 6th EVGA 680i motherboard because of a fried memory controller!
nv: You must have a nvidia GPU to play the games.Thats how its meant to be played :P
NVidia hardware isn't bad, the same thing can't be said about their so called marketing strategies.
Ati had AA, but in the case of Batman, it cost performance. Unlike the ingame solution which doesn't. ATi of course still has better performance thanks to the HD5870 having a very healthy horse power lead over nVidia offerings.
And of course PhysX/CUDA can run just fine on the CPU. Anything that can run the CUDA environment can run PhysX, and nVidia from the beginning has made the CUDA environment free to use and develop for any hardware, including ATis hardware. However, you have to realize that PhysX itself is ported from running on dedicated hardware, to running in a CUDA environment. And issues will arrise from this, such as not using more than one CPU core.
This is how it is, now all submit to the big green phallic probe.
That or they feel that us normal gamers are beneath them and will never be smart enough to find out about the shit they pull.
No true gamer would require AA. And no true gamer would say a game has to have AA to be enjoyable. It is that simple.Oh please, now you are just making shit up. Get your facts straight, nVidia has equaled or bettered ATi in price to performance for at least the last two generations in every performance segment the two competed in.
Nvidia has the source code, the physx is not an open standard, a game with hw physx would run a lot worse on ati hw than on nvidia hw, because it is optimized to nvidia hw.
Nvidia wouldn't let a game with nv's own tech to perform better on ati hw.
You are seriously over estimating the power required to run PhysX, any current ATi hardware would have been able to completely kill in PhysX performance. Remember, the original hardware the PhysX API ran on was 128MB PCI cards...
BTW, you han't even posted when I was writing that post, and you almost jumped into it, as if some of us could tell what you were going to say and do..........